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Corporate Collaboration: The Essential Ingredient to your UC Strategy
Page 1 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
As video sharing pervades consumer lives, enterprises must make room for it in the workplace. From WebRTC to consumer video in the enterprise, UC technology innovation is changing the future of collaboration. Enterprises are beginning to learn that the essential ingredient to any UC strategy is corporate collaboration.
Video sharing: Your kids can do it. Why can’t your employees? By: Irwin Lazar
As video sharing pervades consumer lives, enterprises must make room for it
in the workplace. Nemertes Research explains the business case, concerns
and tips for video content management.
Among the under-30 crowd, video sharing is pervasive. Services like
Instagram, YouTube, Vine and Snapchat easily allow individuals to make
their own videos and share them with friends. But most companies lack these
same capabilities for business collaboration, either internally or externally
with business partners. That's rapidly changing.
The Nemertes 2014-15 Enterprise Technology benchmark, based on data
gathered from more than 200 end-user organizations, found that more than
half (54%) of companies already have an enterprise platform for video
capture and streaming. Another 18% are either evaluating products or
services, or are planning a deployment by 2015; just under 29% have no
plans. So, problem solved, right? Not exactly.
Video sharing use cases in the workplace
When we dug into use cases for video content management and streaming
platforms, we found that the overwhelming majority, nearly 67%, are primarily
using them for distance learning, allowing employees to access a library of
video-on-demand content regardless of location. The second-biggest driver
(7%) is recording video conferences for future playback. While both use
Page 2 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
cases are valuable, neither allows users to easily create their own videos and
share them as they can with public services like Instagram. Just a handful of
companies are enabling support for such capabilities.
Govern your video policy
What happens if IT doesn't deliver a streaming video platform of its own?
Employees will simply attach their videos to emails or upload them to file
servers, clogging up storage resources. In the worst-case scenario, much
like we saw with instant messaging and are currently seeing with mobile
document sharing, workers will simply bypass corporate IT and use
consumer services outside of IT's control. Circumventing IT creates security
and governance headaches as companies lose control of content, and
consumer applications make it next to impossible for personnel to search for
relevant video content.
Either of these scenarios has the potential to add to network congestion
woes, especially at remote sites or across maxed-out Internet connections.
Neither allows for IT governance, which includes retention, classification and
encryption policies. Just 26% of benchmark participants have a policy in
place to govern recorded video, while 11% plan to have one by the end of
2014. The remaining 63% are either evaluating potential policies or haven't
even started to look at video content management requirements.
Prepare your network for video sharing
So, what's an enterprise IT planner to do? Fortunately a slew of companies
exist that provide enterprise-grade video content management capabilities.
These include Brightcove, Ignite, Kaltura, Kontiki, Qumu, and VBrick as well
as video conferencing vendors like Cisco, Lifesize and Polycom.
Key differentiators among the vendors include:
• the distribution architecture (e.g., peer-to-peer multicast, distributed
appliance or network multicast),
• support for cloud storage,
Page 3 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
• support for popular desktop and mobile operating systems,
• the ability to integrate with existing video conferencing platforms,
• the ability to integrate with learning management systems,
• the ability to integrate with enterprise search platforms,
• the ability to transcribe audio tracks to enable individuals to quickly scan
video content and jump to a desired point, and
• social capabilities that enable users to comment on or share video, or
even find relevant video.
IT leaders should take a proactive approach toward user-generated video
management and distribution. Create a checklist of the features that are most
important to you and use it as a guide to evaluate the solutions providers that
are out there today. Remember that if you don't provide the ability to share
video, your users will find it elsewhere.
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game By: Irwin Lazar
Unified Communications is poised for rapid change that will be driven by a
perfect storm of mobilized workers, innovative technologies and a changing
vendor landscape.
On the vendor front, Microsoft Lync is challenging Avaya and Cisco for
market dominance, while new cloud-based providers promise to allow IT to
scrap its own servers, disband centralized technology budgets and assign
spending to specific lines-of-business.
Meanwhile UC technologies are evolving to enable new kinds of
communication through a wider variety of endpoints. WebRTC offers the
power to democratize UC by extending features like voice and video into any
desktop or mobile web browser. Additionally, UC vendors are integrating
wired and wireless worlds to better serve the growing base of unwired
workers who spend more time on tablets or smartphones than at desks.
Finally, video isn’t just for conferencing anymore, as consumer services such
Page 4 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
as YouTube and Vine drive enterprise video collaboration and content
sharing in the enterprise.
The following five trends are changing UC with the potential to alter how
companies deploy technology and how business professionals communicate:
1. Cloud-Based UC: How SaaS Will Change the Way We Spend
More than 90% of companies now use Software as a service (SaaS)
applications, according to the Nemertes 2013-14 Enterprise
Technology Benchmark.
Enterprises are turning to SaaS partially because they lack in-house
expertise and need speedier deployment. But even more important,
SaaS allows enterprises to be flexible with IT resources and
spending.
Specifically, buying cloud-based UC applications allows IT to
eliminate capital spending and move to an operational cost model in
which companies only pay for what they need, when they need it.
What’s more, SaaS allows IT teams to push service costs directly out
to specific lines-of-business.
Cloud UC isn’t for everyone, however. The larger the user base, the
more likely it is that cloud services will be more expensive than on-
premises UC, according to Nemertes Research. The tipping point for
IP telephony is about 2,500 users. Cloud services don’t allow for the
customization that some organizations require, and the cloud may
not be acceptable if security regulations dictate that companies must
store all data on premise.
The solution may be in deploying a mix of cloud and on-premises
applications, but that requires integration using middleware from
Page 5 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
vendors such as Esna and Next Plane to allow presence federation
between applications. That means additional cost and complexity.
But integrating services from multiple cloud providers (e.g., one
vendor’s Web conferencing with another’s video), is even more
problematic.
Despite the challenges, most companies will take cloud services into
consideration as they evaluate UC technology.
2. Mobile UC: Enterprises Must Deliver UC to a Multitude of
Devices
Enterprises have learned quickly that the BYOD trend can benefit
them if personal and enterprise-issued devices are used to improve
worker productivity. So they’re moving to support mobile workers
across a wide range of devices and mobile operating systems, and
enable mobile UC applications.
Employees demand capabilities, like single-number reachability and
the same set of UC features on their tablets or smartphones that
they have on their desktop. For IT, supporting mobile workers entails
a new set of challenges, including guaranteeing real-time application
performance on crowded wireless networks, tracking user location
for 911 response, securing applications and data on employee-
owned devices and managing UC performance on mobile devices
outside of IT’s control.
In tackling these issues, companies will continue to embrace mobile
device management and mobile application management tools from
vendors including AirWatch, Good and Mobile Iron. Or they turn to
mobile carriers such as AT&T and Verizon for hosted mobile device
management services.
Meanwhile, most UC vendors have delivered fully functional mobile
clients for personal and enterprise devices that support their
applications and features. Mixed-vendor shops, however, face a
Page 6 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
larger problem because it’s generally not possible to enable a
seamless end-user experience across many disparate UC
applications and features on one mobile device. Often this challenge
leads UC architects to consolidate UC vendors around a single
strategic partner that can deliver a fully integrated set of applications
on desktops and mobile devices alike.
3. Video: Not Just for Conferencing Anymore
Video is an increasingly central part of collaboration technology,
becoming a more universal conferencing tool while simultaneously
transforming into a medium for enterprise content sharing.
On the video conferencing front, new codecs like H.264 high profile
and H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) are reducing the network
impact of video, even enabling high-definition video across the
Internet or public 3G/4G wireless networks. H.265 is on the horizon,
offering the same benefits but in a standard protocol that should
allow interoperability among various video vendors. Cloud services
such as Blue Jeans Network and Vidtel provide the ability to hold
conferences among a mix of room and desktop endpoints, mo-bile
users and consumer services (like Skype)—all without the capital
cost of buying a multipoint conference unit.
Meanwhile, a revolution is taking place as companies embrace user-
generated video, bringing the capabilities of consumer services like
YouTube into the enterprise. From recording video conferences for
future playback to distance learning, video is quickly emerging as a
way to share content internally and externally from a multitude of
sources. IT leaders are evaluating and deploying multipurpose video
platforms from vendors including Kaltura, Kontiki and Qumu. They’re
also looking at integrated options from video-conferencing vendors
like LifeSize and Polycom. Even service providers like Verizon are
getting into the mix, delivering content management and sharing as a
Page 7 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
hosted service.
4. WebRTC: Voice and Video for All… No UC Platform Required
WebRTC enables Web browsers to function as voice and video
endpoints without the need for a separate app or browser plug-in.
This means users can “click-to-call” from within a webpage or mobile
app without ever having to pick up the phone. Ultimately, WebRTC
aims to provide UC apps like telephony and video conferencing to
literally anyone.
Because WebRTC is implemented using JavaScript, Web
developers can use the technology to add voice, video and screen
sharing to their applications. This means they can enable peer-to-
peer communications without using a UC platform, which raises
some concerns that Web developers will create rich media
applications without the knowledge of the network team.
Despite all the hype, WebRTC is still in its infancy. Chrome’s and
Firefox’s implementations aren’t supported by Internet Explorer or
Safari. Video codec standards aren’t universally defined and
common telephony features like compressed voice codecs aren’t yet
supported. Still, WebRTC represents one of the more exciting and
potentially transformative areas in UC.
5. Lync: Transforming the Vendor Landscape
Ever since Microsoft introduced “VoIP As You Are” in 2007, Microsoft
has gradually challenged the incumbent VoIP vendors including
Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Siemens and ShoreTel. Its efforts recently
accelerated with the launch of Lync and Lync 2013, positioning
Microsoft as a full-fledged, fully featured alternative to competing
telephony platforms with one major advantage—the company’s
applications already dominate the desktop.
Microsoft is convincing a growing number of its IM and Web
Page 8 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
conferencing customers to embrace Lync for telephony. As a result,
the company is gaining market share and establishing credibility as
an IP telephony and video conferencing vendor. It’s also challenging
organizational models that present telephony as a networking ap-
plication. For Microsoft, telephony lives in the application and
messaging domains.
Microsoft still has a long way to go to equal the installed base of its
larger competitors, but it continues to press for a larger piece of the
UC pie.
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy By: Karen Kervin
Collaboration is a key component of the unified communications (UC)
discussion. Many think of corporate collaboration in communications as the
audio/Web-conferencing and shared-workspace component of the UC tool,
but there is so much more to it. Collaboration means using communications
tools to enable geographically distributed employees and work groups to
cooperate with each other to achieve a business objective or goal.
Most UC and collaborative communications solutions are not single products.
This means they require integration, either between technical elements or
with processes and other applications, in order to simplify user enablement.
Corporate collaboration is what brings value proposition to UC by improving
productivity and reducing travel expenses and real estate costs. The
overarching goal of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is to not
only improve intracompany collaboration, but to seamlessly and effectively
allow real-time intercompany collaboration and communications.
Shared components of UC and collaboration
In addition to talking, audio/Web conferencing and shared workspaces,
collaboration also encompasses the following UC components:
Page 9 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
Chat, text or instant messaging for quick discussions
Presence for knowing who is available for quick discussions
Social collaboration for sharing information and documents
internally
Email for discussions that need more words and possibly
attachments
Video conferencing for face-to-face collaboration
Integrating UC and collaborative components
UC architects should spend time with end users to determine current and
future collaboration and UC needs in order to understand which components
to implement. Since most of these elements are not single products,
components must be integrated for maximum productivity and ease of use.
UC architects tend to integrate these tools into the IP telephony platform, into
the cloud, into the corporate data center or some combination of the three.
Integration, for instance, makes it possible to view someone's presence
status from within a customer relationship management (CRM) application or
from a mobile device. It can allow a user to click-to-conference with a
coworker then escalate into a video chat. Collaboration tools must be easy to
use or they won't get used. Integration is the key.
Combine corporate collaboration and UC in the cloud
As enterprises assess how to build, deploy and manage their UCC strategy,
they are turning to managed, hosted and cloud-based UC service providers
to impact success. A recent 2012 Nemertes Research Group survey found
that use of managed, hosted and cloud (MHC) services is exploding, with
75% reporting use of such services in 2012, and the majority (58%) reporting
they intend to increase MHC service usage over the following year. Cloud-
based UC services are a key method for reducing the complexity of your
UCC deployment. For this strategy to be successful, follow these steps when
building a UCC strategy:
Page 10 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
1. Take a complete inventory of your infrastructure assets and network,
staff skills and capabilities, and total cost of ownership, and
understand how your IT strategy aligns with your business plan.
2. Decide which UC components should be outsourced, and determine
return on investment (ROI) and service-level expectations.
3. Create a plan outlining key milestones, skills requirements and
cutover priorities.
4. Choose a financially viable provider with a good track record of
quality and responsiveness that can fill in where your internal team is
weak.
Once your UCC plan is implemented, and end-user training is complete,
ensure that you can show ROI in terms of reduced travel, enhanced
productivity and end-user satisfaction. This should be easy to do since
collaboration, both inside and outside the company, will be greatly enhanced
due to carefully planned unification.
Page 11 of 11
Contents Video sharing: Your
kids can do it. Why
can’t your employees?
Five UC trends that change the collaboration game
Corporate collaboration: The essential ingredient to any UC strategy
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